Selfportrait
by syrrah
Summary: a picture - a promise - a prompt


Characters property of SM

Self-portrait

Where is the dividing line between a boyfriend and a lover? Does is all come down to sex - how far you've gone? What if you've had sex with someone but you don't go out with them? Or what if you go out with someone for months and months but you don't have sex? Who is your boyfriend and who is your lover? It could be semantics, or definitions, or terminology - the way you look at things as an individual, maybe there's no official answer. It's not something I'm going to ask anybody.

I can dwell on it though. I'm pretty good at dwelling.

A year and a half ago, I started a new school. Hell, I started a new life. My parents live states apart in more ways than one and I'd been with my mother for a long time. She's as mad as a three-legged goat but her bohemian heart is loving and giving and though I might have had to take care of basics like bill-paying, she took care of things like ensuring that our curtains were rainbow colored and that we bought fair trade and free range and non animal tested groceries. No child labor had been involved with the production of anything in our house other than whatever I did, which she managed in her ditziness to overlook.

She's lovely really, I adore her. We're pretty co-dependant and when she found a boyfriend it was a big adjustment for me. Boyfriend? Definitely a lover. There was no doubting what was going on in the bedroom next to mine, and no denying the glow she began to radiate.

But this lover of hers needed to travel, and I was still at school. She wanted to go with him - all sunshine and smiles in the newness of their love - and I was too young to be left alone and it would be too disruptive to my education for me to go along and struggle with learning by correspondence so it was decided I would go and live with a total stranger by the name of Charlie Swan, her ex-husband. My father.

Mom and I lived in Phoenix and I loved it. My street was of rock gardens adorned by the blue-grey paddles of prickly pear and its occasional pink, and squat white-rendered houses with dark roofs and arches over the verandahs. The dry, dry heat. The shimmering mountained horizons, and everywhere and everything soft with muted colors. My parents conspired to uproot me as though I was no further sunk into the ground than a saguaro and fly me over the country to somewhere damp and cold.

Washington exploded with green that almost hurt my eyes. Not harsh - that depth of green could never be harsh, but there was a permanent eerie atmospheric chill that seeped. I couldn't understand the science of it - the light in Arizona was so direct and bright and the colors were so gentle, but in Forks the light was indirect yet the greens were brilliant - almost blue and the browns almost black.

On my first day at school I saw Edward Cullen and he saw me and we both stared. I knew why I did - I hadn't even had a serious crush yet, and his beauty hit me so hard I nearly lost my shaky equilibrium. I didn't have any idea why he would stare at me and for weeks he frowned and looked pained and made me feel like a leper. We were lab partners in biology and he acted like my presence physically hurt him. Then he made a complete turnaround and tried to be friendly, by which time I had the barriers up. Neither of us could work the other out.

It all changed when one day there was an incident in the school parking lot and another student's vehicle skidded straight in my direction. Edward was nearest to me, and he pushed me out of the way. We ended up on the ground tangled in each other's limbs with our eyes about four inches apart and our mouths even closer. I saw right into him, his concern and his fright. I saw that he was in a panic because he was on top of me. We were completely alone locked in a tiny world in between Tyler Crowley's van and my truck and Edward's eyes said that he _wanted_ to be alone in a tiny world with me, our limbs tangled and our mouths close. He got up in extreme embarrassment without saying a word, just looking at me with intensity that betrayed his feelings, and he literally ran away.

He was at the hospital later, hovering to see if I was all right, yet he didn't want to speak to me. He couldn't hide from what I'd seen, though.

"What happened back there?" I asked him and he didn't want to answer.

After that his behavior toward me was inexplicable. I would turn to find him constantly behind me. He kept staring. He was alternately friendly or insisting we couldn't be friends. He and his brothers and sisters would sit in the cafeteria and I would know when he was looking at me but if I glanced up his eyes would be averted.

I'd made a couple of friends by then and prom was coming up. My friends wanted to go to Port Angeles shopping for their prom dresses. I said I'd accompany them on the trip but I had no intention of going to prom because I wasn't going to accept an invitation when whoever asked me might want to kiss me, and I didn't want to kiss anybody. Well, I did. I wanted to kiss the boy whose shocking thought when I was lying winded underneath him on the ground in a parking lot was to wonder what my mouth tasted like.

I didn't know Port Angeles at all and I went looking for a bookshop while Jessica and Angela were trying on dresses and I became disorientated. Edward Cullen turned up in his shiny silver volvo to lead me out of the maze. He knew the restaurant I'd arranged to meet them in but I was so late by then they'd already eaten. He smoothly offered to take me for dinner himself and then drive me home and he swept me through the restaurant door even as they giggled.

And then he was charm personified. Epitomized. It extended through dinner and the drive back to Forks and into every day at school. He walked with me between classes. He started to wait for me in the mornings outside my house to drive me to school and to drive me home. He never touched me.

And then one night I was talking to my mother on the phone when I heard a noise at my window. Edward Cullen slipped through it.

Mom was quizzing me about whether there there were any boys in my life and I figured maybe I wouldn't tell her there was one in my bedroom so I said I'd talk to her later.

What then? I sat on the bed, he sat on the bed. He said, "I want to try something," and I knew he did. So did I. It took an age of our heads bobbing towards one another and then back slightly, us both sweetly hesitant yet desperate for our mouths to touch. He leaned on his hands, I was kneeling and we exchanged breaths, so close, then kissed very slowly, yet it was still fire. I reacted first by moving forward into him and he let me and inclined his head and opened his mouth further, and then he pushed me backwards, hand to my hip, lips hot and urgent. I pulled him between my legs as he crushed me into my pillow but it was over as soon as it started. Before I could hazily blink he was on the other side of the room.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled in confusion, not understanding what had happened. He turned away from me, and that wasn't the start of my not understanding him and it wasn't a turning point, it was a compounding of everything already between us. The staring, the mixed messages, the reticence, the dazzling charm. He was always there, ever present and we talked and talked and I knew we were growing closer and closer. He took me to meet his family and he took me to his bedroom and we danced in there but he fled when he thought our bodies might touch.

I went to prom with him. We danced quietly alone and his lips found my neck and I pressed myself to him and he allowed kisses then, in public. I wanted to be unrestrained but he wouldn't give me his tongue and he whispered "Isn't this enough?"

Edward. What did I want from him? I didn't know exactly. My hips against his, I felt his desire but I had never had a man in me and wasn't sure if that was what my ache was. It seemed inexpressible.

After prom everyone knew we were together. In public we were Bella and Edward, names linked. But in private we were Bella. And Edward.

There was more kissing. He came to my room every night and came to my bed and lay above the bedding while I lay below. I burned in there and we caressed non-sexual body parts, shoulders, arms, hands. We kissed and for me it was inflammatory and it's true he groaned when our mouths were together and if I licked him he shivered and if I bit him his grip on me tightened and his hips would press once or twice into mine, but he had a line that couldn't be crossed.

"Bella, we can't," he would growl, and that was that.

My eighteenth birthday was coming up and I knew he would get me something extravagant. His family are wealthy, and he would spare no expense. There was something I wanted in particular though that had nothing to do with money.

I decided that for my birthday I would give _him_ something.

It took a lot of work and a lot of time but I have inherited some sort of artistic eye from my mother and knowing exactly what I wanted helped. I made many rough copies before I was ready to embark on the final picture and I sketched it very lightly with lead pencil before using the cream and pink and cerise and pale violet.

The night of my birthday I was invited to Edward's house where his family had prepared a party for me. Of course their presents were lovely, the dinner was lovely and Edward was lovely. They took me in with warm acceptance even when I wanted to scream, "Your son and I just kiss like schoolkids and he won't complete us!" but of course, I didn't.

Then he drove me home, and in the stillness and quiet of my room I handed him the picture I had made.

"This is for you," I told him.

He smiled with the crooked smile he sometimes has and took it and looked down at it. I had written my name at the bottom but in fact it wasn't a signature, it was a title.

Edward looked quickly, no doubt wondering why I'd given him a drawing of a flower and looked back up at me. I waited. He looked down again. The orchid had two flaring pale asymmetrical petals deepening to an inner pink towards the uneven crease where they met. At the apex of the two flares was a small bud of concentration in darker pink. At the joining of the petals the pink darkened in a shadow to mystery and unknowing. Everything indicated innerness and delicacy. The flower held secrets and beauty and femininity and the meaning of life.

I watched Edward look and he had already been still but he suddenly became stiller. His smile uncurved, a flush stole along his cheekbones and his eyes closed. When he opened them again he looked slowly up to me and swallowed deeply, his adam's apple working in his throat.

"What are you doing to me?" he asked, hoarsely.

"It's my birthday. Can I ask for something? Kiss me," I answered, reaching.

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End file.
